Too Close To Home

Another week, another shooting in the news. This one hit close to home. I have family in Allen, who thankfully were not there that day but are literally always at that mall. I have even been there myself a bunch of times. When I first saw the news, the what ifs running through my mind felt like a gut punch to the soul. Why, oh why, does this keep happening?

For some reason, this got me thinking about 9/11 and the war on terror. For that’s what we’re dealing with here, isn’t it? A new kind of terrorism, something devoid of all sense, something nihilistic and completely evil. At least the jihadis, as bad as they were, had the inkling of an understandable political motivation behind them. What we’re seeing in America is just pure, unadulterated evil—the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction.

Think about this for a second. We lost almost 3,000 people on 9/11 and in response America went absolutely HAM on the global scene. We invaded two countries—one on completely made-up pretenses—opened secret extra-constitutional prisons all over the world, militarized airport security, installed the legal framework for an unprecedented surveillance state (see e.g. the Patriot Act, which is still law), and developed a frighteningly effective drone assassination program that’s been used by every President since and is still in existence today.

We literally blew a hole in the Middle East and just left it in pieces. It was an absolutely staggering response. I’ll leave it for another day to examine whether all of this was justified or moral but one thing seems clear: it looks like it actually worked. I don’t know if it’s possible to win something like the Global War on Terror but I feel like we might have done just that. Ask yourself this: when’s the last time you even thought about terrorism?

Meanwhile, we’re seeing hundreds of deaths from mass shootings each year and are on average (I cannot believe I’m writing this) losing 10x the number of people who died on 9/11 to gun violence in some form or another. Yet, we haven’t done a damn thing in response. We’ve allowed a reign of terror—more savage than anything the jihadi’s ever attempted—to settle in across our land like some gray cloud of doom, shattering lives, families, and dreams in a chaotic pattern. Every day as I drop my kids of at school, I find myself thinking about all this and I’m sick of it. I don’t care that the chances are remote. The chances should be ZERO.

Is the mass shooting phenomenon not of the same character as 9/11? Does it not deserve a similar response?

Because of America’s special constitutional legacy, policy approaches like banning the private ownership of guns, which has worked in places like Australia and Japan, seem completely unachievable. And they probably are. The 2^nd amendment is an important part of our Bill of Rights and not something we should just dismiss. Its origins are noble and predicated on the idea that citizens armed with guns can provide an effective (and perhaps the only) check on the power of the State.

While this was true in the 1780’s, is it still valid today? Part of me thinks the answer is “No.” Weapons technology has come a long way since then and it’s hard to imagine a bunch of citizens with small arms having much of a chance against drones, F18 squadrons, tank battalions, ballistic missile systems, aircraft carriers and the like. That being said, our experiences in places like Iraq, where things proved rather difficult for our heavily armed forces, suggests that we shouldn’t completely dismiss the idea.

In any event, I think the 2^nd Amendment is here to stay and is probably a necessary feature for the long-term preservation of constitutional democracy and freedom. There are far too many recent historical examples where the first move of would-be tyrants was to ban the private ownership of guns.

What, then, can we do?

• We could run the 9/11 response program and militarize schools and other public places and use surveillance technology to try to discover bad actors in the act of planning.

There might be something here but this is also problematic. There’s the whole right to privacy thing (which is also protected by our Constitution) and potentially huge cost implications for our already stretched and heavily indebted system.

• We could train and arm everyone. 

While this feels like it could work, it’s a really bad idea. It would be like recreating the lawlessness of the American West in the 19^th Century—an incredibly violent environment. The truth about these situations is that it takes a highly trained and experienced person to handle an active shooter situation appropriately. Arming everyone would just make things worse.

• We could fix the root problem.

Here, we are talking about fixing whatever it is that’s wrong with our culture. This seems like a big, big task. I’m not sure we even know why this is all happening. My gut says it has something to do with our hyper self-focus, materialistic obsession, and systematic abandonment of all the higher principles and values that hold us together. Essentially, we have become narcissistic in our celebration of the individual and what we know from psychology is that an out-of-control ego with nowhere to turn for validation often becomes destructive.

• We could ban assault weapons and/or make it really difficult to acquire high-powered weapons like the AR-15.

This has been the focus of the policy debate for years and is probably a sensible idea. That being said, this alone will certainly not “solve” the problem. The data we have suggests you are just as likely to see a mass shooting in a state with more restrictive gun control laws than one without. The problem here is that there are something like 500M guns in circulation across the country (in a population of only 330M!). What that means is that if you want a weapon, you can probably figure out how to get one.

You all may be thinking “Ok, do you have any constructive thoughts here or are you just going to complain and offer ‘thoughts and prayers’ like everyone else?”

Look, there are no easy answers here but I do have a point of view. First of all, I think we should treat this with the same intensity as our response to 9/11. This is absolutely an emergency and a threat to our freedom and we should treat it as such. How can you say you are free if you cannot go out in public without the fear of being shot?

Secondly, we should make it very difficult to acquire assault weapons. We need mental health checks, cooling off periods, registries, and regular psychological re-evaluations. We should also pass laws that provide for serious criminal liability for the owners of such weapons if they end up in the wrong hands.

Thirdly, we need to face the truth head-on that this threat isn’t going away and almost certainly requires a massive investment in security. I wouldn’t militarize public places and schools but I do think we should accept that we need a large number of properly trained security forces. I’m not sure exactly how this looks but maybe a combination of stepped-up police presence and something like what we did after 9/11 when we had armed, plain clothed marshals fly commercial jets. Yes, this would cost a lot of money but do we have another choice?

Finally, we need to put in place the legal infrastructure that would allow greater power for involuntary mental health interventions. We have to be really careful here because what we had in the old asylum days clearly wasn’t right or good. But it’s obvious that we have gone too far in our respect for the individual. We know there are times when an individual is so psychologically compromised that he/she cannot be trusted to make decisions. It’s foolish to stick our heads in the sand and ignore this inconvenient truth. We have to be willing to take a stand.

I know that these are all hard, expensive choices but really what choice do we have? Can we really just sit back and allow domestic terrorism in our land? The time for To those who are content to sit back and offer thoughts and prayers, I’ll borrow some words from Churchill, one of the great defenders of freedom in the world:

Unless we do something here “[What we’ve seen so far] is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time."

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